Like the ivory-billed woodpecker, the center deal may be alive and well, comfortably living in secrecy. Johnson’s tribute...
Dealing cards from the center of the deck, a trick only the most exquisite dealers can manage, forms the heart of journalist Johnson’s story of a card artist and crooked gambler.
Dai Vernon was a magician, a fine hand at string and colored silks, cups and balls and coins, but he will be remembered for his finesse at cards, his astonishing, natural and casual grace. He was not a gambler, though, and spent much of his life working as a cutter of silhouettes, a pleasant art form affordable even in the Depression era. With Wichita for a hometown, the Vernon that Johnson reveals became a true obsessive: He would spend hours, weeks, years refining his magic technique—he never went in for smoke, mirrors and wires, preferring the sleight-of-the-unadorned-hand along with any psychological subtleties he might work on his mark. Allen Kennedy, on the other hand, was pure cardsharp and shadows: quiet, unassuming and in complete control of the game, stacking and peeking and dealing from the bottom. And Kennedy could deal from the center of the deck, something Vernon had only heard rumors of. Johnson follows Vernon as he manages to track Kennedy down outside Kansas City to learn the trick of the center draw (it requires doing finger exercises practiced by pianists; Johnson is good at explaining the mechanics). It almost seems that Vernon and Kennedy alone had the requisite touch for the center deal, until Johnson notes a tantalizing story. In 1982, a casino surveillance expert was patrolling the catwalks when he witnessed for the first time a sharp dealing from the center. He didn’t turn the man in—the stakes simply weren’t that high—but observed the rarity from afar and with utter admiration.
Like the ivory-billed woodpecker, the center deal may be alive and well, comfortably living in secrecy. Johnson’s tribute will make you hope so.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7406-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
